Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon. Many integrated circuits are typically manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer, and individual dies on the wafer are singulated by sawing between the integrated circuits along a scribe line. The individual dies are typically packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, or in other types of packaging, for example.
In the lithography process, a photoresist is applied to a wafer. The photoresist is a material that forms a pattern when it is exposed to radiation. A thin layer of the photoresist is spread on the surface of a wafer, and the photoresist is exposed to form a pattern in the semiconductor manufacturing process. These patterns now have very fine details, and some issues in the photoresist may cause an unsatisfactory image in the exposed photoresist. Although existing devices and methods for lithography processing have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects. Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a solution for improving the quality of the exposed photoresist.